Prop 8 Documentary Sells Out at Sundance

Screenings for a film chronicling California's same-sex marriage ban and the Mormon Church's role in Prop. 8 have sold out at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, reports the Advocate.

A Utah State University graduate’s controversial film on the LDS Church has sold out five screenings, making the much-anticipated documentary one of the most popular entries in this year’s festival.

The film titled 8: The Mormon Proposition was sold out before any other Sundance documentary and all but a handful of feature films. A total of 271 movies will screen at the festival, which runs from Jan. 21 to 31.

According to Utah’s Herald Journal, filmmaker Reed Cowan, a 1997 USU graduate in broadcast journalism, directed the 80-minute documentary will have its world premiere January 24 at the festival.

“We plan on opening up a dialogue during the festival and hope that dialogue will continue on a national level for years to come,” Cowan told The Herald Journal. “The film is important and premiering in Utah makes it even more important. ... Bringing an examination of the wrongdoing to the scene of the crimes, so to speak, is historic.”

The official plot summary for 8: The Mormon Proposition:

In 2009, thousands of LGBT citizens are denied almost 200 civil rights their straight, married counterparts enjoy through civil marriage. Some states have signaled progress. But amid the progress, The Mormon Church, with its front-group THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MARRIAGE, has been coordinating, financing and leading the effort to stop the advancement of marriage equality for more than three decades. As an organization worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the Mormon Church has been able to wage this war in secret. Not until the California Fair Political Practices Commission launched an investigation into the Mormon's involvement in Proposition 8, did the secrets of the Mormon effort become a matter of record.

Through never-before seen documents, recordings & insider-interviews, 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION, exposes the efforts of the Mormon Church and its members to halt nearly every piece of LGBT legislation on the desks of lawmakers from Hawaii to New York. 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION makes these efforts a matter of record and challenges viewers to demand more of government officials in requiring religions more transparency in their efforts to influence public policy.

Emmy-award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan is a former Mormon who served a two-year mission door-to-door for the Mormon Church. His access to high-level Mormons & Mormon communications on the matter, coupled with his OUT status as a gay man and father of two adopted sons has provided a compelling and at times shocking look at the Mormon way of doing business against LGBT people.